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Exclusive: Savile events cancelled

Plans to hang photographs of Jimmy Savile on Cunard ships have been abandoned together with a memorial event on Queen Elizabeth next year, Meridian can reveal.

After his death Cunard said that photos would be put on Queen Elizabeth, QM2 and Queen Victoria, all based in Southampton.

Savile, who has been the subject of numerous allegations of child abuse following the airing of an ITV documentary last week, was a regular passenger on Cunard’s ships making an estimated thirty voyages.

He travelled on board the Queen Elizabeth on its first voyage around Britain in September last year, the month before he died, and was at the ceremony when the Queen named the ship in 2010.

He also greeted the QE2, Cunard’s former flagship, in a fishing boat off the coast of Yorkshire, on one of its final sailings in 2008 before it was retired to Dubai.

In January, the cruise line announced that its Queen Elizabeth ship would conduct a sail-by of Savile’s burial site in Scarborough on the North Sea coast next summer.

However, since the ITV programme was broadcast, the company has since withdrawn the event from its schedule.

Cunard said: “In the light of recent developments, clearly Cunard will not be going ahead with the planned sail-by next year.”

Earlier this week, the police described Savile as a “predatory sex offender” who had a “predilection” for young girls.

Family members also had his tombstone removed from the Woodlands Cemetery in Scarborough where he is buried.